I found it interesting wandering around the ancient sites in Egypt to see what survived 4000 years. Granite was the easy winner followed by heaped structures of softer rocks.
Doesn't something lasting 4,000 years imply massive over-engineering?
Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
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Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#22As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress. As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of compe…
I'm a software engineer that went through architecture school and I think you're glorifying architects a bit here. The only reason why architects have a more gradual path as you describe is because there is a LOT of gatekeeping and feedback on your work is a LOT slower. To become an architect you have to ideally go through schooling at a specific set of schools and then after that you have years of internships where…
Same applies to countries where Software/Informatics Engineering is a proper title certified by the Engineering National Council, not a paper title.
http://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especia...
https://www.anerkennung-in-deutschland.de/html/en/engineerin...
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#23As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress. As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of compe…
Napster was written by a 19yrs old. Bram wrote bittorent when he was 26yrs old. Justin Frankel was 22yrs old when he wrote gnutella with Tom who was 25yrs old. I mention these systems, because these were apps that needed to operate at scale.
Yes, yet I wonder how good they would stand if someone did a proper Software Engineer review of their architecture and code quality.
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#24As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress. As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of compe…
What, no architectural bootcamps? No shiny new frameworks? No this will disrupt everything? No hype cycle?
Meh, I think architecture has its own version of it, with extreme form-over-function, and new projects insisting they have to look clever and pretty, even when those aspects make them near useless.
A friend on Facebook recently posted about an example of a bike path with three sharp turns that made no sense for being used as a bike, but -- the architects were happy to point out -- made it look like a big bike wheel from above. Hooray!
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#25This MIT professor looks like a very intelligent guy, and I agree with what he says, but the article shows that the reporter did not understand some things.
Plasticity theory is presented as an alternative to the finite element method, but in fact they are usually used together. While plasticity theory explains how materials deform, the FE method makes possible to apply this theory to complex structures.
In any case, the problem cannot be FEM, but how it is applied and how the results are interpreted. It is very likely (even expected) that applying the requirements used for steel or concrete structures to the Pantheon will give you wrong results, but that does not mean FEM is the problem. Blindly doing simulations without having a good model and being very careful of how boundary conditions are applied and how to interpret the results, on the other hand, is becoming a greater problem as the necessary hardware becomes more affordable.
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#26The megaliths of Bolivia and structures all over the world which man could not replicate prove this. It would seem that the more we turn our back on the natural world and our history, the more we hold ourselves back from break throughs in many areas.
Who says we can't replicate them? It's just not economical to do so and really serves no purpose. The world has generally moved past projects with superstitious/dubious meaning attached to them and does an actual cost/benefit on most large scale endeavors. Except for some developing countries with growing economies who have something to prove.
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Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#27I found it interesting wandering around the ancient sites in Egypt to see what survived 4000 years. Granite was the easy winner followed by heaped structures of softer rocks.
Doesn't something lasting 4,000 years imply massive over-engineering?
depends, if you want your glorious mausoleum to last _forever_ then it lasting 4000 years would imply "correct" engineering to me
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#28I found it interesting wandering around the ancient sites in Egypt to see what survived 4000 years. Granite was the easy winner followed by heaped structures of softer rocks.
The problem with that for architecture is most structures are meant to be occupied, and being inside a heaped structure of softer rocks isn't very nice. I do wish that I got to see a structure meant to last millennia built in my lifetime. On that timescale, I _just_ missed Mount Rushmore.
This, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#29As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress. As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of compe…
I've read a bit of Christopher Alexander, and at least by his view the profession of architecture was in a fallen state conducive to soulless work. I don't know myself, except I've been to Barcelona which must've been doing something different.
Re: Architects have a lot to learn from the sound engineering of the ancients
#30As a software "engineer", I've always been envious of architects and the well-defined path to mastery that exists in their field. You start off as a lowly apprentice and only through years of study and practice can you progress. As a result, the best architects in the world are generally forty and above and there is a correlation between age and competence. There is no 22 year old rockstar architect. The bar of compe…
Napster was written by a 19yrs old. Bram wrote bittorent when he was 26yrs old. Justin Frankel was 22yrs old when he wrote gnutella with Tom who was 25yrs old. I mention these systems, because these were apps that needed to operate at scale.
As other people stated: they build standing from the shoulder of the giants.
And even if they had started from zero, these guys are the exception, not the norm.
We can find 20 year-old geniuses in every camp.